Why do some queen bees have a painted dot on them?
Most suppliers of queen bees will mark the queens they ship to you with a colored dot of paint on the top of the thorax for a very small fee (.50 cents or so). This colored dot not only helps you quickly find the queen among the other bees in the hive should you need to, but will also signify what year the queen was introduced into the hive. Queen breeders use a color numbering system so that queens marked with blue indicate years ending in 0 or 5, white a 1 or 6, yellow a 2 or 7, red a 3 or 8 and green for years ending in 4 or 9.
